Task Force on Human Resources for Health Financing

Human resources represent the largest single cost element in providing health services in developing countries. Yet these developing countries face a challenge in finding the resources and the appropriate pay methods to ensure an adequate supply and mix of health workers and stimulate productivity, responsiveness, and the provision of effective care.

Significant barriers constrain efforts by governments and donors to increase spending on this input. To overcome these barriers and maximize health worker performance, country policy-makers and international agencies must give greater attention to the economic factors influencing health workers and their implications for the financing of health workforce plans.

To improve the effectiveness of financing policies for HRH in developing countries, the Alliance established a Task Force on Financing in January 2008. It now completed its work. It was co-chaired by David de Ferranti, former World Bank Vice President for Latin America, and K.Y. Amaoko, former Executive Secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa. Their work has focused on the following three objectives:

Building awareness of the importance of economic and financing issues within the global movement to focus attention on the scale up of the health workforce;

Pulling together into a Framework Paper what has been learned and what remains to be investigated concerning economic and financing issues related to the health workforce; and

Developing and testing a decision tool (labelled the Resource Requirements Tool or RRT) for use by country-level planners and decision makers to estimate and project the costs of desired health workforce scale up and development.

In addition to coordinating the development of the RRT and related technical papers, the Alliance Task Force on HRH Financing has trained consultants and national personnel in Liberia, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Uganda, Peru and Ghana on the use of the RRT.